Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)


Halt and Catch Fire ended last year after four seasons.  It’s not a show I’ve talked about much on the blog (just gave a shoutout to Donna in a Top Five post of actors I’ve had to reevaluate,) but I really did love it.  It’s a bit of a sneak-attack show.  It starts rather unevenly – I stuck it out through most of season 1 largely because I’m a Lee Pace fan – but somewhere along the way, it evolved into a truly rich show with interesting subject matter, complex characters, and rewarding themes (a few spoilers.)

In the early ‘80s, a Houston electronics company is rocked by the arrival of Joe, a mercurial maverick with big ideas about the future of personal computing.  Joe has a lot of vision but little knowhow to back it up, so he enlists engineers and coders both within and outside the company to help him in his goal of revolutionizing the industry.  Over the course of the show, the characters all go on their own journeys trying to stay at the forefront of the rapidly-changing world of computers.

Like I said, the first season can be hit-or-miss.  There’s a lot of focus on Joe’s particularly Machiavellian way of conducting business, and it feels a little Don Draper redux.  The other characters are still finding their footing, especially engineer Gordon and coder Cameron.  It’s all very dysfunctional but without anything genuinely compelling to back it up.

As time goes on, however, the show gets pretty awesome.  I especially love the threads that follow Donna and Cameron as women in tech building their own company and getting involved in some really innovative things.  The more stock interactions of the earlier episodes get fleshed out as the characters build history with one another.  Because of course, that’s what the show really hinges on, more than any work crisis or technological advancement.  As Joe says, “Computers aren’t the thing.  They’re the thing that gets you to the thing.”  He’s talking about computers as a means rather than an end, but the same holds true for the show as well.  This backdrop, this world, is just our jumping-off point to examing these messy, flawed, talented individuals as they chase ideas no one’s had yet, separately and together.

I also want to note that this is a show that manages time jumps very effectively in my book.  There are a few at different points throughout the series, which makes sense from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, since the show would want to cover some of the different leaps in the tech industry between the ‘80s and early ‘90s.  But, critically, with each jump, we feel the effects of the time lapse with the characters and their relationships.  It’s not like Downton Abbey or The Assets where the show jumps ahead for the sake of the history but leaves the plots in limbo for the interim.  Here, things have happened, lives have changed, and you see the effects of those changes playing out onscreen.

As with any strong character-driven show, acting is critical, and Halt and Catch Fire definitely delivers on that front.  Like I said, I came to the show for Lee Pace, and while Joe doesn’t do much for me early on, the series does a lot of work with his character, and by the last season, I like him a lot.  The show was my introduction to Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis, and Toby Huss, and as Gordon, Cameron, and Bos, they embody their characters to a T.  But for me, the series MVP is Kerry Bishé’s terrific performance as Donna.  I am an unabashed Donna fan, and even when the character loses her way and does things I don’t like, Bishé knocks it clean out of the park every time.

Warnings

Language, sexual content, drinking/some drug use, a few scenes of violence, and thematic elements (including suicide.)

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